


[AUTOMATION IS DEADLY]

by Alias (anafabula)



Category: The Protomen
Genre: Act II: The Father of Death, Albert Wily has ASPD, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Antisocial Behavior, Banned Together Bingo 2020, Blood and Violence, Blood onscreen from violence offscreen, Canonical Character Death, Emotional Manipulation, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Offscreen major character death; onscreen major character dead, and as someone before me wisely put it:, but it's earlier., one (1) corpse, to be specific, with bonus panic attack, wow we have psychopathy and sociopathy tags but not aspd ones smh ao3 smh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:40:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28140294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: “Tom,” Wily says quietly, stopping close enough for concern, far enough for shock, and in time not to get blood on his shoes, “Tom, whathappened?”
Relationships: Background/Canon Thomas Light/Emily Stanton, Unrequited(?) Thomas Light/Albert Wily
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	[AUTOMATION IS DEADLY]

**Author's Note:**

> Back at it again with the Jenny Holzer titles folks! Also with the ~~filling “`Ranged Weapons`” without ever actually textually specifying the murder weapon versus thinking of it as being extrapolatable from the musical. Oops~~ filing this as “`Violence Against Women`” because it wasn’t appropriate for General Audiences after all. For that reason. I am very funny.

In the end what boggles the mind most is that Emily Stanton is too self-righteous to fight back. From Wily’s perspective, anyway. There’s a lot that he could excuse at least in terms of being willing to notice it existed — for example, most of her existence — but in the end her death was almost as incomprehensible to him as it was to Light.

Not that he can complain. He worried about defensive wounds, about things not making sense, about having to put more thought than he’d hoped into the art of a convincing coverup. He would, of course, and it would be fine. But he didn’t exactly look forward to it, the same way he was confident in his work but by no means fond of the uncertainty involved.

Wily’s not exactly in love with the idea of getting his hands dirty, but there’s something _orderly_ about the prospect just in terms of narrative. Offloading the work onto SGN-001 was elegant, inaugurating the second generation of robots with the honor of taking out of human hands even the labor of murder, but it was only an order in the vaguest sense: Wily could not have a clear idea of what the machine’s instructions were. Their minds had proved fundamentally inscrutable without breakage — which was the only reason this would work, but taking advantage of a systematic flaw did not erase the issue of there being a flaw, let alone a fundamental one, a crack in the foundations of their work to worry at until he lost the will to do so or he fixed it — and everything it did had to be deniable as error.

In other words, he’s almost as surprised by the corpse as Light is.

Emily died clean and easy, it turns out, perhaps the only easy thing she ever chose to do. Certainly in everything else she’d seemed affixed on doing things the hard way. Or perhaps _clean_ is a misnomer after all, given that amount of blood.

Wily hangs backward, lets Light take control of the space, a feat he does with urgent, heavy strides. Wily thinks about how to deal with losing time that could’ve been work and how many days of work to assume they will in the end lose; it brings him tentativeness, anxiety, a sense of dread, and Light’s breathing room.

He counts the seconds into deniability, and then startles himself, so that the pause can have been that, can have been the one of them who’s not in medicine seeing human panic and human blood out of the corner of his eye and freezing. (He does, in fact, have little routine exposure to injury except in fleeting moments on the factory floor; certainly he doesn’t spend his life pressed up against the fact of it like Light does. He just also doesn’t particularly care, but for the indicator of damage to be dealt with or lack thereof.) Their apartment isn’t a studio but only just, meaning that he has to time coming into view just right (without overthinking it, which, he’s certainly failing at that part).

He thinks it through: he heard Light panic and run forward, heard him drop to his knees, and can hear what sounds like the beginning of panicked murmuring — that’s the right time to follow. Hesitantly, like he’s never seen the path in front of him before. “Tom?” he calls. “Tom, is—”

And rounds the corner. Perfect. That wasn’t even on purpose.

Light’s making an admirable effort at something like best practices — when Wily sees him, that hard audible impact to the floor brought him to a controlled stop, and he’s searching for a pulse or any indication of breath, fingers quickly flickering through motions he doesn’t seem to have gotten right the first time but with only the barest tremor. He is not crying, and his face is blank, but his breaths rasp and they do so faster than they should. Wily wonders if what he’s watching is, in particular, Thomas Light trying to convince himself that what he’s seeing isn’t real, and how successfully the effort is going.

“Emily,” Light’s saying, “Emily, please, come on, girl, come on, you — you got to—”

“Tom,” Wily says quietly, stopping close enough for concern, far enough for shock, and in time not to get blood on his shoes, “Tom, what _happened_?”

“I can’t—” Light says, not looking up, but all he’s doing is repeating the same systematic passes over pulse points, leaning in to see if there’s any breath he somehow missed before recoiling from the chill of its absence, every motion reiterated almost as soon as it’s ended, this panicky recursion into disbelief in the present by way of confidence in ritual. Wily forgets that Light is a medical doctor, sometimes, or at least a doctor in medicine. It prepared him more than enough that Wily is glad the body’s evidently cold. “I can’t—”

Wily comes closer, makes it hesitant in timing but careless in style, has greater things to worry about but a hard time bringing himself to get there; he puts a hand over his mouth quickly at the blood.

He’d _forgotten_. She had a clotting disorder. She hid it for work.

Wily had forgotten.

_Beautiful._

His shoes stick, slightly, enough for him to discern their sick pathetic squeak under his partner’s labored breaths. He crouches down and affects further hesitation, unsure of whether any contact of his should help, if an emergency would overrule human distance. “Breathe,” he says quietly. Light does not need there to be any uncertainty in his voice. So there is none.

“I,” Light gasps, “I—”

“Tom, I don’t know what’s going on, but you panicking isn’t going to help anyone and — come on, Tom, _breathe_.” The fact that he’s the only person in the room who Wily could give that instruction to, despite the physical presence of three other intelligences, does become something of a bonus. “Now tell me,” he adds, too quickly, fast enough to be concern. “What happened?”

“She was—” Light swallows and seems to take notice of his position, suddenly; his grip on the body changes. The fingers tightened on her neck, digging for a long-absent pulse in a way that would’ve bruised in its presence, relax. He shifts easily and without apparent thought to something closer to cradling her, staring, still. “I.” 

“Easy,” Wily says. It is, in fact.

“I came in and she was—” He bites both his lips, quickly, then presses onward. “On the floor. With. No — no response to — she wasn’t awake and I thought I felt a pulse for a second but it…” He looks up, finally. “Was just hope,” Light says quietly.

Wily tilts his head and twists his face with concern, curious to know what gave it away. It’s the ignorance of an author teasing out detailed criticism, not of the man who never considered being a medical examiner, but that’s neither here nor there.

“She’s cold,” Light says, and that statement is what breaks him; he buckles forward, over the body, arms bloodied to the elbow, and contaminates the evidence irredeemably, cradling her as he cries.

**Author's Note:**

> “Alias do you have more planned in this AU” I’m not saying I know whether I will get around to writing it but yes there are thoughts 
> 
> “Alias you got it stuck in my head, you bastard” The fandom is a warning 
> 
> “Alias I have something else to say that you did not preempt” Beautiful, please comment


End file.
